Denver Director betts doc honored by Pan African Film Celebration

donnie l. betts’ insightful and entertaining bio-doc about Oscar Brown Jr., “Music is My Life, Poetry My Mistress,” (2005) will screen next month at L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival. Set to mark its 20th year, the festival plans to honor the area director, actor, producer, cultural mainstay’s first feature film as one of its “gems” from the archives of movies screened over the past two decades. The Pan African Film Festival runs February 9-20.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.